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Phil has taken Jonathan Green, the editor of The Drum, to task for commissioning a series of pieces by climate change skeptics.

As expected, the first piece off the rank by Alan Moran is a load of climate skeptic bullshit.

It is the intellectual equivalent to “balancing” a piece on the horrors of Auschwitz with a piece by a holocaust denier.

This obsession with balance gives “the other side” (climate change skeptics, creationists etc) a false legitimacy and creates an erroneous impression that their arguments deserve equal consideration. It may sell papers and create web traffic but is simply being intellectually lazy.

At first it was rage as a listened to George Pell display his noted efficiency of combining arrogance and ignorance as he talked about climate change on Richard Glover’s Drive this afternoon.

Then it became pity as I realised the man has so greatly compromised his intellect to accommodate his reactionary views that he has lost any vestiges of credibility. A transcript is not available but Pell claimed that certain facts about climate change are not deniable. The one that stood out was his claim that no warming had occurred since 1998.

Really George? Have you read this? Or this? How about this? Then there is this.

Consider what can’t be denied soundly and effortlessly denied.

Then again, given George’s day job is peddling myths it is not surprising the subscribes to some in his personal politics.

The Times has an excerpt from Richard Dawkin’s new book The Greatest Show On Earth detailing the evidence for the theory behind the fact of evolution. In the excerpt, Dawkins decides that a mild, mannered approach to combating creationism is required. Just kidding. He throws the following bomb at creationists:

Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers. Unlike my hypothetical Rome-deniers, Holocaustdeniers really exist. They are vocal, superficially plausible and adept at seeming learned. They are supported by the president of at least one currently powerful state, and they include at least one bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that, as a teacher of European history, you are continually faced with belligerent demands to “teach the controversy”, and to give “equal time” to the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust never happened but was invented by a bunch of Zionist fabricators.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether the Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally “respected”.

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire.

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According to an article on ugly men make more sperm. You see

Scientists have found attractive males produce less sperm during sex.
Researchers think good-looking males are biologically geared to hold back their sperm in each encounter to
increase their chance of impregnating more females.
But unattractive males know they are not going to bed so many females – so when they do get lucky they give it all they’ve got.

But when you go to the actual research, you find that the research is not about humans but concerns chickens.

In fact the researchers state that

Finally, how this work applies to humans and other primates is not yet known. Human attractiveness is complicated and influenced by a number of factors including cultural preferences. Nonetheless, ejaculate size and sperm quality are likely to have been moulded by similar forces, like attractiveness and the number of sexual partners, that are important in other species.

Which makes the following statement in the article arse about:

The findings from the University of Oxford and University College London are backed up by studies of chickens and fish, but researchers think they could well apply to humans too.

Well yes but the caution of the researchers is not reflected by the staff writers who extrapolate this to a story about the virility of “ugly men.”

This must be the quality journalism that John Hartigan has been talking about.

It internecine battles mark the maturity if a movement then atheism has reached a high point with the stoush between Jerry Coyne and Chris Mooney. It all started with Coyne’s review of two theistic evolution books in the New Republic. This was followed some criticism from Barbara Forrest and then an exchange of blog posts at dawn between Coyne and Mooney. Needless to say there is more to come.

Coyne does a grand job showing the inadequacies of certain strain of theistic evolution in his New Republic article. A provocative and well argued review that has reverberated around the community where evolution and religion is discussed. It is a civil review and Coyne is at pains to ensure that he was fair in both praise and criticism. Unfortunately, it has lead to the creation of an unfortunate term “accomodationist” to disparage those that find no problem with the like of Ken Miller. Accomodationist is a stupid term and is a distraction from the main game. I don’t see why we simply name Miller et al as collaborationists and call for their removal from the order of proper sciency folk.

I’m not really sure what the point of this stoush really is. It seems to be based around that any religious ideas are poisonous and if scientists have religious ideas it will corrupt science. But science has accommodated religious beliefs for centuries with no problems. And given the religious nature of some of the past evolutionary science heavyweights, I see no danger if someone does have religious beliefs yet is quite happy to accept evolution as is.
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There seem to be two responses to the swing flu outbreak. Calm, reasonable, responses that separate the reality from hype (via Tigtog).

And there are the sensational, no relation to reality “OMG, the end of the human civilization” that passes for MSM reporting. Which naturally brings us to zombies.

Max Brooks’ most excellent World War Z actually tackles zombie epidemiology. The outbreak first appears in China and spreads around the world pretty much like how swine flu found its way out of Mexico. People naturally traversing borders with the authorities ill-prepared or even unaware of the danger.

Zombie epidemiology does attract all sorts of interesting, armchair internet theorists. There is the Zombie Infection Simulation which shows how quickly one zombie can create a horde of the living dead.

Evolgen and Andart discussed the evolution of zombie populations. Zombies do have to be careful not to eat all of that tasty living human flesh.

And in a remarkably prescient article from early April, Justin Berk in the Yale Daily News uses zombie movies to discuss public health and the spread of pathogens through the world.

And if you are really worried then the Zombie Survival Guide is a good investment for the future.

It has happened before and it will happen again is an apt description of immunisation scares in Australia.

I was horrified to learn that 334 cases of whooping cough have occurred on the Central Coast this year. This is a deadly, preventable disease. In Queensland, you find parents not wanting to immunise their children even with a measles outbreak.

At the moment I’m not sure where people are getting their anti-immunisation ideas from but it is irresponsible.

The department of Health and Ageing has a good website on the facts of immunisation. The pdf, The Realities: Disease Preventable by Vaccines shows the effectiveness of vaccines over the years. Vaccines do work and are important to preventing deaths from many diseases.

It would be sad to see that anti-vaccination quackery is one more making its insidious way through the population. Hopefully it may just be a seasonal flux and not a sign of something sinister.

Okay, I was being a little bit silly with the idea of Shark Jihad but after the attack yesterday at Avalon, reality has once again trumped satire.

The so called plague of sharks has lead the NSW Opposition to claim the government is not doing enough to protect people from the shark menace.

One thing that must be noted is that all three attacks have happened around dawn or dusk. Precisely the wrong time to be in the water if you want to avoid a shark. So aerial patrols won’t do much (unless these are sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their head and visible at night or in low light). .

Of course, there are those that just want to go a kill sharks. But sharks are not fast breeders and as apex predators, a decline in shark numbers could very much create an ecological imbalance that would harm fisheries in general. The claim of a dramatic increase in numbers is anecdotal and a form of selection bias. It may be that there are more sharks closer to shore (due to increased bait fish activity for example) but no dramatic increase in the number of sharks overall.

There is great gap between the perceived risk of a shark attack and the real risk. There are many ordinary activities that we engage in every day that pose a far greater danger to us. But sharks do spark a primal response in humans and a good shark scare is a gold mine for the media.

Happy Darwin Day everyone!

It is almost over in Australia but Dave will soon be getting up and into the spirit of Darwin Day. Or he will just watch some hockey.

I’m just going to link to some cool articles on Chuckles for my contribution.

Why Darwin?

Don’t call it Darwinism.

Darwin’s influence on our language.

Charles Darwin, the meteorologist

Crunching the data for the tree of life

February 12th will mark the 200th anniversay of Charles Darwin’s birth as is know as Darwin Day.  Expect a lot of interesting media presentations over the next few days. Also expect a lot of rubbish as well.  And Brisbane newspaper, The Courier Mail, decides to start the week with a horribly wrong piece titled Questions Darwinism cannot answer.

The author is Tom Frame, a professor of Theology as Charles Sturt University who has a book Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia out at the moment.

After a few expository paragraphs Frame gets to the point:

Evolutionary theory does not explain everything we want to know about the natural world or human life, and some of what evolutionary theory purports to explain it hardly elucidates at all. While we might know how some things occurred we still want to know why. Most importantly, why is there something rather than nothing?

Interesting choice of words especially “everything we want to know.” Evolutionary theory does not have to explain everything that we want to know. We want to know are many things. The idea that evolutionary theory may have the answers is borne out of the mistaken notion that is an alternative to religious creation stories and thus should be able to offer answers to the same questions that religious stories attempt to answer.
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